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Texas
- Weekly DispatchAug 3, 2026
The first two weeks: what a new homeschool should actually attempt before it tries to cover anything
A family that has chosen the curriculum, built the day, learned to read progress, selected its outside resources, and worked out what to do when a child refuses now faces the part none of that prepares it for, which is starting. The common instinct is to open on day one at the pace the family intends to hold in March, and that instinct is responsible for a large share of the collapses that arrive three weeks later. The first two weeks are not for covering material. They are for installing a routine that a family can repeat on a bad morning, and the schedule that survives that test is almost always shorter than the one written in July. Plus the policy dispatch as North Carolina extends its ESA+ offers and the Texas funding calendar turns out to work differently for homeschoolers than for private school families.
The last five issues built a working early-grades year and then addressed what to do when it meets a child who will not participate, which completes the planning and leaves the execution untouched. This issue takes up the first two weeks of an actual homeschool year and argues that they serve a different purpose than the rest of it. The failure this addresses is specific and common. A family that has prepared carefully arrives at day one with a full schedule and the intention to run it, and the preparation itself is what makes the full-speed start tempting, since the materials are bought and the timetable is written and holding back feels like waste. What that start ignores is how much is genuinely new at once. The hour is new, the working space is new, the books are unfamiliar, the relationship between parent and child inside a lesson is a role neither has occupied before, and the transitions between subjects have never been performed, which matters because transitions rather than lessons are where a young child's morning is actually consumed. A schedule that assumes every one of those works on first attempt will fail, and the family will usually misattribute the failure to the curriculum or to the child instead of to the schedule that was never tested. The issue proposes a different measure for the opening fortnight. The question at the end of two weeks is not how much was covered but whether the routine repeats without force, whether day eleven resembles day three, and a family that can answer yes has built something a bad morning cannot dismantle. The practical shape that follows is a first week considerably shorter than the target, limited to one or two subjects, anchored by a fixed start time treated as the only non-negotiable element, with explicit attention paid to the transitions between activities. Week two adds a single element at a time, which preserves the diagnostic value of the exercise, since a routine that breaks after one addition identifies its own cause while a routine that absorbs five changes at once identifies nothing. The issue then works through the four failures that surface earliest: a parent's uncalibrated sense of what a sufficient day looks like, drawn from a school model that spends most of its hours on logistics a home does not have; the younger sibling whose needs were never given a place in the schedule; a timetable with no margin, which converts any ordinary interruption into a lost morning and then into evidence of failure; and materials that live somewhere other than where the lesson happens, which quietly adds minutes to every transition. Families arriving directly from public school are treated separately, because their first two weeks are less about starting a routine than about ending one, and the adjustment period they need is real and is not idleness. The issue also notes the obligations that begin on day one whatever the academic load, since attendance and record-keeping requirements are set by state law, vary substantially, and cannot be reconstructed after the fact. Plus the policy dispatch, covering North Carolina's extension of 2026-27 ESA+ award offers on a three-week acceptance clock following the July state budget, and the Texas Education Freedom Account distribution calendar, which pays homeschool and other non-private-school accounts in full at the start of the year while reserving the installment schedule for private school awards.
Getting Started·First Week·Homeschool Day·Routines·New Homeschoolers·Deschooling - Weekly DispatchJul 27, 2026
The day the child will not do the work: telling ordinary resistance from a signal worth acting on in a K-3 homeschool
The curriculum is chosen, the day is built, the progress is readable, and the additions around the core are settled, which is a complete early-grades year on paper and no protection at all against the morning a six-year-old refuses to open the math book. Every homeschool meets this and no curriculum prevents it, because resistance is not a curriculum problem in most cases and is a serious one in a few. This issue separates the ordinary friction that every young child produces from the smaller set of signals that indicate something structural, gives the order in which a family should change things so it does not throw out a working program over a bad fortnight, and names the point at which the right move is an outside opinion. Plus the policy dispatch as the Texas accounts are funded on a calendar that works differently for homeschool families than for private school families.
The prior four issues built a complete early-grades year, the curriculum selected against a family's actual constraints, the day assembled around a young child's working attention, the progress read by watching the child work without a school's testing machinery, and the enrichment resources around the core chosen on whether they serve the child instead of the parent's fear of doing too little. That is a full picture of a functioning K-3 homeschool and it offers no defense whatsoever against the morning the plan meets a child who will not participate in it, which is the situation this issue takes up. The refusal is close to universal and it is heaviest in the first year and the youngest grades, and the most common mistake a family makes in response is to treat it as evidence that the curriculum was wrong, because the curriculum is the visible, purchasable, swappable thing and changing it feels like action. In most K-3 cases the curriculum is not the problem. The issue works through the ordinary causes in the order a family should test them. The work may be genuinely too hard, which is a placement problem and not a program problem, and the fix is to move down a level inside the curriculum the family already owns. The work may be too easy, which produces a resistance that looks identical from the outside and requires the opposite correction. The timing may be wrong, because a young child has a narrow window of real working attention and a lesson scheduled outside it will fail regardless of its quality. The child may not be developmentally ready for a skill the scope-and-sequence assigned to that grade, particularly in handwriting and formal reading, where the ordinary range of readiness spans years and a standard sequence describes an average child who does not exist. The remedies for all four are cheap, and the issue argues for a strict order of operations, adjusting time and length first, then the mode of the lesson, then the placement level, and only then the curriculum itself, on the reasoning that a family which reverses that order spends hundreds of dollars solving a problem that a different hour would have solved for free. The issue then addresses the cause families find hardest to examine, which is that a meaningful share of resistance originates on the adult's side of the table, transmitted through a parent who is tense about being behind, and the issue treats that as a diagnosis and not an accusation. Finally it separates out the pattern that is not ordinary friction, the resistance that attaches to one specific skill while the rest of the day goes fine, that persists across every change the family makes, that comes with physical distress or avoidance out of proportion to the task, or that accompanies a gap which does not close over months of consistent work, and it names that as the point where the correct next step is an evaluation, past which further schedule tinkering is only delay. Plus the policy dispatch as the first Texas Education Freedom Account distributions land, with homeschool and other non-private-school accounts paid in full on July 1 and private school accounts moving toward an October installment.
Resistance·Reluctant Learner·K 3·Elementary·Homeschool Day·Learning Differences - Weekly DispatchJul 20, 2026
Beyond the curriculum: which of the library, the co-op, the outside class, and the online supplement add to a K-3 homeschool, and which only add to the schedule
The curriculum is chosen, the day is assembled, and the family can read whether it is working, which finishes the core of the early-grades year and opens the question of what to add around it. Four resources present themselves to every new family, the public library, the co-op, the outside class, and the online supplement, and each is sold as enrichment while each also carries a cost in time, money, and attention that the core program has first claim on. This issue takes the four in turn, names what each one genuinely adds to a K-3 home and what it mostly adds to the calendar, and gives the test a family can apply before saying yes: does the resource serve the curriculum and the child, or does it serve the family's worry that it is not doing enough. Plus the policy dispatch as the first Texas purchasing cycle closes.
The prior three issues assembled the core of the early-grades year, the curriculum chosen, the day built, and the progress read through observation rather than a school's testing machinery, and this issue turns to the resources a family adds around that core. Four of them arrive at every new homeschool and ask for a place in the week, the public library, the local co-op, the outside class, and the online or app-based supplement, and each is presented as enrichment while each also draws on the time, money, and attention the core program has the first claim on, so the family's real task is not whether each resource is good in the abstract but whether it earns its cost against the core. The library is the exception that is almost pure benefit, effectively free, deep, and directly useful to the early-reading years, and the issue treats it as the backbone of a K-3 reading life rather than a weekly errand, describing how a running relationship with a good library does more for early reading than most paid programs and how to build the habit that makes it work. The co-op is the resource most oversold and most variable, genuinely valuable when it teaches a subject well or supplies a lab or a discussion a single family cannot, and mostly a scheduling commitment dressed as instruction when it is really a weekly social gathering, and the issue helps a family tell which co-op it is actually joining before it commits a morning a week to it. The outside class, the instrument, the sport, the art or dance class, adds a genuine skill the parent may not be equipped to teach and a fixed external commitment the rest of the week must arrange itself around, and the issue gives the plain arithmetic of how many fixed commitments a K-3 week can absorb before the core lessons start losing the mornings they need, which is a smaller number than an eager family expects. The online supplement and the educational app are where the most marketing money and the least evidence meet, sold as adaptive personalized learning and frequently working as a screen that keeps a child busy while teaching and measuring far less than the interface implies, and the issue distinguishes the few tools that do a defined job well, a math-facts drill, a typing program, a single well-built reading app, from the many that occupy time without advancing the child. Running under all four resources is one test the issue makes concrete and repeatable: a family should add a resource when it serves the child and the curriculum, a skill the parent cannot supply, a book the home cannot hold, a discussion the family of one cannot have, and should decline it when it mainly serves the parent's fear of not doing enough, because that fear will fill an unlimited calendar and the early grades are the years when a crowded calendar does the most harm. Plus the policy dispatch, which carries the close of the first Texas Education Freedom Account purchasing cycle and what the opening cycle revealed about how families actually spend the accounts.
Enrichment·Library·Co Op·Extracurriculars·Online Learning·Educational Apps - Weekly DispatchJul 13, 2026
Assessment in the early grades: how to know a K-3 homeschool is working without importing the apparatus of a school
The curriculum is chosen and the day is assembled, which leaves the question that arrives once a family is actually teaching: is it working. The early grades answer that question differently than a school does, because a parent teaching one to three children sees the evidence directly and does not need the testing machinery a classroom uses to see thirty children at once. This issue describes what progress actually looks like in kindergarten through third grade, the light records worth keeping and the ones a state may require, and the placement and readiness checks that tell a parent whether to move a child up, hold, or adjust. Plus the policy dispatch and the first full purchasing cycle on the Texas accounts.
The prior issue assembled the K-3 day, and this issue takes the question that arrives once a family is teaching it, which is how to know the early grades are working. The answer begins by setting aside the instrument most families arriving from a school reach for first. A classroom assesses constantly through quizzes, unit tests, and standardized batteries because a single teacher cannot otherwise track thirty children individually, and that machinery is a solution to a problem a home does not have. A parent teaching one to three children sees each child directly and daily, hears the reading lesson, watches the math worked, reads the writing as it is produced, and therefore knows where each child stands without a formal test. Assessment in the early grades is mostly disciplined observation, and the issue describes what progress actually looks like, the reading that moves from sounding out to fluency over the K-2 span, the math facts that shift from counted to automatic, the handwriting that becomes legible and the sentences that lengthen. The formal checks worth running are few and purposeful, a periodic reading-fluency read, an occasional math-facts check, a placement test when a program offers one, used to answer a real question rather than to generate a grade. The records worth keeping are correspondingly light, a running list of finished books, a dated folder of work samples that shows growth across the year, a simple log of what was covered, and on top of that whatever the family's own state specifically requires, which ranges from no records at all to annual standardized testing or portfolio review depending on the jurisdiction and must be checked against the state's own rules. The assessment that genuinely earns its place is placement, the decision to advance a child to the next level, hold at the current one, or adjust the pace, and the issue gives the concrete readiness signals that answer it for reading and for math. The failure mode named plainly is the family that imports the school's constant-testing apparatus into a home that does not need it, subjecting a young child who is visibly learning to quizzes that measure what the parent can already see and teaching the child that assessment is the point. Plus the policy dispatch, which carries continued reporting on the Texas Education Freedom Accounts as the first full purchasing cycle unfolds and the record-keeping the accounts themselves require of participating families.
Assessment·Record Keeping·K 3·Elementary·Placement·Reading Fluency - Weekly DispatchJul 6, 2026
The K-3 homeschool day: how little time the early grades actually take, and how to fit more than one child into a morning
The curriculum question is answered. The question that replaces it is how to put it together into a day, and the honest first fact is that K-3 takes far fewer hours than newcomers fear. The core fits in a morning, the skill subjects fit in the margins, and a family with more than one young child does not run two schools in parallel but combines what it can and staggers what it cannot. Plus the policy dispatch: the first reporting on how Texas families are actually spending the accounts that funded July 1, and where the early purchases are landing.
The K-3 curriculum coverage that ran from issue 03 through the skill subjects of issue 10 is complete, which moves the question from what to teach to how to assemble it into a day. The issue opens on the fact that most reassures and most surprises new families, which is that the early-grades homeschool day is short. A classroom spends much of its six hours on transitions, lines, attendance, and the management of twenty-five children, none of which a home with one adult and a few students pays, so the actual seated academic work of kindergarten through third grade fits inside a morning and often inside ninety minutes to two hours. The core, the daily reading lesson, the math lesson, and a read-aloud, is the spine of the morning, and the skill subjects from issue 10, handwriting in ten minutes, spelling in fifteen, an occasional song-based language session, fit into the margins rather than demanding blocks of their own. The structural problem the issue spends its length on is the family with more than one young child, where the workable model is to combine the subjects that combine across ages, the read-aloud, history, science, art, nature study, taught to all the children together at the oldest child's level with the younger ones absorbing what they can, and to stagger the subjects that are irreducibly one-on-one, the phonics lesson and the math lesson that each child needs alone while a sibling does independent work or plays. The issue describes loop scheduling as the technique that keeps the lower-priority subjects from being perpetually crowded out, names the planners and the morning-time approach that hold up in practice, and states the dominant failure mode directly: the family that imports the six-hour school day into the home overschedules, exhausts the children and the parent, and quits in the fall, when the early grades never required those hours in the first place. Plus the policy dispatch, which carries the first reporting on how Texas Education Freedom Account families are spending the funds disbursed July 1, the categories the early purchases are clustering in, and the marketplace mechanics families are encountering in practice.
Scheduling·Homeschool Day·Loop Scheduling·Multiple Children·Morning Time·Elementary - Curriculum ReviewJun 29, 2026
The K-3 skill subjects: handwriting, spelling, and the foreign-language question most families answer too early
The core stack is decided, and what is left is the ring of skill subjects around it. Handwriting splits between the two letter styles that drive every program. Spelling splits between the families that teach rules and the families that argue a separate spelling course is unnecessary in the early grades. Foreign language is not a program choice at all in K-3 but a timing question, and the honest answer for most families is later than the marketing implies. Plus the Texas ESA disbursement that landed July 1, and which of these subjects an account will actually reimburse.
Issue 09 finished the K-3 core with history and geography, which leaves the skill subjects that sit around the core: handwriting, spelling, and foreign language. These reward less deliberation than reading or math did, and the issue says so. Handwriting comes down to two decisions: which letter style the family wants, and the program that teaches it. The two reference points are Handwriting Without Tears, now published as Learning Without Tears, with its vertical manuscript and developmental, manipulative-driven approach, and Zaner-Bloser, the traditional vertical manuscript that most school-style programs inherit, with D'Nealian as the slanted alternative that eases the transition to cursive. Spelling splits differently, between the rules-based, Orton-Gillingham programs led by All About Spelling and the position that a dedicated spelling course is unnecessary in the early grades when a strong phonics reading program is already teaching the patterns. Spelling You See and the spelling strand inside Logic of English are graded as the other two common answers. Foreign language is treated not as a program choice but as a timing question, because it is the K-3 subject families most often begin too early, on too little time, and abandon. The issue argues that the only early-grades foreign-language instruction that survives is the low-stakes, song-based kind, with Song School Latin and Song School Spanish as the representative gentle entry, and that a family short on hours should spend them on the core and defer formal language. Each program is graded on the same rubric the core issues used, with the same caveat that the rubric measures execution and not fit. Plus the policy dispatch: the Texas Education Freedom Account program made its first disbursement to homeschool accounts on July 1, the recipient count for 2026-2027 grew to nearly 96,000 students, and the marketplace rules determine which of these skill subjects an account will actually reimburse.
Curriculum Review·Handwriting·Spelling·Foreign Language·Handwriting Without Tears·All About Spelling - Curriculum ReviewJun 1, 2026
Math-U-See vs. Saxon Math K-3, and the Texas ESA first-wave enrollment numbers
Two heritage homeschool math programs, graded on the same rubric. Plus the Texas Comptroller's first-wave enrollment report for SB 2 ESA, the South Carolina ESA reauthorization vote, and the dispatch.
Issue 03 covered Singapore Math Dimensions versus RightStart Mathematics, the two strongest mastery-with-conceptual-depth programs. Issue 05 covered All About Reading versus Logic of English Foundations, the two strongest phonics programs. Issue 06 covers the two heritage scripted math programs that elementary homeschool families have used for two decades: Math-U-See from Demme Learning and Saxon Math K through 3 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Both spiral, both scripted, both available used at scale. Both produce strong arithmetic outcomes on the standardized-test metrics that homeschool co-ops report. They are not interchangeable, and the differences are bigger than the front cover suggests. Plus: the Texas Comptroller's first-wave SB 2 enrollment report covering March through May 2026, the South Carolina ESA reauthorization Senate vote, and the weekly policy dispatch.
Curriculum Review·Math U See·Saxon Math·Elementary Math·K 3 Math·Texas - ESA UpdateApr 27, 2026
The $8,474 gap Texas just wrote into law
Plus West Virginia Hope goes universal, the Cathy Duffy vacuum, and a Charlotte Mason primer for families who have never heard the name.
Texas TEFA paid $10,474 to private-school families and $2,000 to homeschool families in its inaugural application window. West Virginia Hope went universal. Cathy Duffy is semi-retired and the curriculum-review market has moved on without her. A quick primer on Charlotte Mason.
ESA·Texas·TEFA·West Virginia·Hope Scholarship·Charlotte Mason